Milton Katselas, a prominent acting teacher and director whose students included George Clooney, Alec Baldwin, Michelle Pfeiffer and hundreds of other actors, has died at the age of 75.

Katselas, who founded the Beverly Hills Playhouse acting school in 1978, died of heart failure two weeks ago at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, said Allen Barton, executive director of the playhouse. His book ACTING CLASS , TAKE A SEAT, that was recently released, takes the reader inside one of his legendary, invitation only acting classes.

For decades, Emmy-winning actress Doris Roberts studied with Katselas and was a regular at his weekly master class.

"I learned something new every Saturday, even when I was working on 'Everybody Loves Raymond,' " she said. "He had such insights into people. He was so capable of finding the kernel in you that was stopping you from succeeding."

In an interview last year on " Inside the Actors Studio" Pfeiffer said he taught actors to "second-guess your first superficial choice" in how a role should be played, which "prepares actors so you are a little director-proof . . . because you learn to be your own director."

Included in the long list of actors he taught were Gene Hackman, Anne Archer, Kate Hudson, Kim Cattrall, Chris Noth, Tyne Daly, Jenna Elfman, Robert Urich, Patrick Swayze, Tom Selleck and Tony Danza.

He was only 24 when he started to teach acting in New York after observing a class that failed to impress him and a friend convinced him he could do better.

"When I teach, my job is to bring out whatever is possible," Katselas said in 1998 in Buzz magazine. "It's not my job to push the ejector seat on somebody's dreams."


Milton George Katselas was born Feb. 22, 1933, in Pittsburgh to Greek immigrant parents. His family ran a small restaurant near a local electric plant, whose workers kept its 14 stools filled.

Eventually, his father "bought a movie house with a pool hall under it," Katselas told The Times in 1985. "That's where I started to do my studies in human psychology -- I did some hustling there."

In Pittsburgh, Katselas studied theater at what is now Carnegie Mellon University.

After graduating in the 1950s, he went to New York, "scared stiff" about breaking into theater, he later said, and studied with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio.

When Katselas spotted Elia Kazan walking down the street, he chased down the director and spoke to him in Greek.

Eventually, Katselas apprenticed with Kazan and worked for other noted theater directors.